Basement chemists

As for getting outside people, no, I don t think you can do it. I think these big statistical studies just bury what you are trying to find. In our study we had a physical chemist look at physical chemistry space and a biochemist look at biochemistry space. You really have to understand the field to know why it matters. If somebody s cauldron is in the basement and they are extracting up on the fifth floor, you have to know a lot to understand why this arrangement could be so damaging to somebody. How could an outside person come in and do that ... 

A My father studied to be a chemist but dropped out of graduate school when he married my mother during the Depression. We had many chemistry books around the house but I was told that they lead only to unhappiness and I shouldn t read them. This only encouraged me to look at them, and 1 used to read them with a flashlight under the covers of my bed. My parents did not permit me to have a chemistry set, so 1 formed a close relationship with the local pharmacist, who supplied me with chemicals that today would not be possible. With them 1 assembled various pyrotechnics. and once set the basement on fire. 

Leaving Ernest Rutherford in Montreal in 1906 Hahn had moved to Berlin to work with Emil Fischer at the university. Fischer was an organic chemist who knew little about radioactivity, but he understood that the field was opening to importance and that Hahn was a first-rate man. He made room for Hahn in a wood shop in the basement of his laboratories and arranged Hahn s appointment as a Privatdozent, which stirred less forward-looking chemists on the faculty to wonder aloud at the deplorable decline in standards. A chemist who claimed to identify new elements with a gold-foil electroscope must be at least an embarrassment, if not in fact a fraud. 

Research by the chemist Ludwig Ziehl presents yet another example of war materials research at the Institute. While still an undergraduate in 1944-1945, Ziehl conducted experiments with a model, stainless-steel combustion chamber in the basement of the partly destroyed KWI for Chemistry. His secret apparatus consisted of a sealed reaction chamber with a window through which the combustion of the samples, probably fuels and fuel additives, could be directly observed. Like Werner Wittstadt and Hans Bartel, Ziehl was among the members of the Institute who would follow Thiessen to the USSR in the fall of 1945 and become involved with the Soviet atomic bomb program. As an expert physical chemist, Thiessen himself evaluated and tested some, often rather fanciful, ideas for Nazi wonder weapons which had been sent to the authorities. ... 

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